1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to integrated circuit (IC) chip designs, and more particularly to circuits facilitating to interchange external connectors or terminals of an IC chip.
2. Description of Related Art
FIG. 1 schematically shows an IC chip configuration comprising a package and an internal circuit. Around the package, a plurality of external connectors or terminals is disposed. For explanation simplicity, only two external terminals A, B are shown in FIG. 1. The external terminal A is electrically connected with pin 1 of the internal circuit for transferring data between an external device and the internal circuit. Correspondingly, the external terminal B is electrically connected with pin 2 of the internal circuit for the similar purpose.
In the course of chip designs requiring to continuously update the design solutions, there will be different versions in a kind of chips. Different versions may result in different layouts of the external terminals in the same kind of chips. However, in some applications, the application circumstance of the chips does not change along with the versions of the chips, thereby sometimes causing an updated version of the chips to be incompatible with the original version.
Thus there is a need for techniques for interchanging the external terminals of chips in order to increase the compatibility of the chips.